The publishing industry has greatly benefited from the many advances in digital imaging and printing technologies. Indeed, one of the many advances has been the creation of an on-demand printing market where a publisher prints small quantities of a book or other publication to satisfy orders for the publication as the orders are made. This is especially advantageous where requests for the publication are sporadic or limited, such that generating a typical print run would not be cost effective. Moreover, on-demand printing proves advantageous when the publisher is not the originator of the publication and has only a printed copy of the publication, since the publisher can scan the pages of the publication, and generate a document therefrom.
Publishers, including on-demand publishers, receive source copies of a publication in a variety of formats, including digital and printed formats. Authors will provide electronic source copies of a document in a particular format using a word processor. This type of document has the advantage that the content is free of extraneous speckles and lines (referred to as “artifacts”) that arise when source documents originate from a scanned or photocopied source. For example, FIG. 1 is a digital image 100 of consecutive, facing pages from a book that illustrates the extraneous artifacts, including speckles (102-108) and lines (110-112) that arise for a variety of reasons while scanning, faxing, and/or photocopying printed content. Of course, the artifacts are not part of the content and, if printed as is, create a distraction to a reader and generally suggest that the published book is a cheap imitation of the genuine article. In short, if these pages (and others with similar artifacts) were printed in a book, a customer would likely view the book as entirely unacceptable.
In spite of the fact that many authors could provide publishers with a source copy of content that is free of artifacts, more often than not the source copies have some artifacts that detract from the overall quality of the book when printed in an on-demand manner. Unfortunately, on-demand publishers simply use the source copy provided to them by authors or content aggregators, relying upon them to maintain the source copy artifact-free. Moreover, when the source copy is a printed document (such as a 100-year old book that has long been out of print), even the best scanners and photocopiers frequently include artifacts.